Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> writes:
> By the way, the binary encoding would be pretty useful for BYTEA
> columns and parameters, but it's a pretty hefty burden for almost
> anything else. Wouldn't it make sense to add a format flag which
> basically says "binary if it's BYTEA, otherwise text"?
What is "easy" is very much in the eye of the beholder --- I would think
for instance that a lot of people would consider integer columns to be
easy enough to deal with in binary format. ntohl() isn't much of a
burden.
As far as output goes, I seem to recall some discussion awhile back of a
format value that would mean "send <some list of types> in binary" where
the specific list could be set by the client. This would seem to me to
be a lot more useful and less klugy than hard-wiring bytea as a special
case. On the input side it's much more questionable since (as you
noted) clients don't always have a solid grasp on which parameters
are which types.
regards, tom lane